


bedsheets

by blueparacosm



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Murphy Has a Good Long Cry, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 16:25:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11017131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: He’s seventeen years old and the bed smells like someone named Bellamy instead of green apple candies or old books like it's supposed to and the earth is on fire and nobody says a word about any of it.





	bedsheets

Space is cold.

Space is dark.

Space is boring.

A red blanket lies across Murphy’s middle as he pulls the threads apart absently. He knows he shouldn’t be unraveling their only source of warmth, but Emori’s off gallivanting around with her new friend Raven, arms piled high with scrap metal and tools and she looks, somehow, the happiest he’s ever seen her. And space is boring.

The compartment door creaks open cautiously, and Murphy suddenly has the untraceable feeling of being a corpse in a coffin, a gravedigger peeking inside and he has the urge to cover his chilled bones.

“John, I’m going to spacewalk with Raven.” Emori tries to stifle the gleam in her eyes, the excitement grabbing her by the ankles and rocking her back and forth on her heels. “I’ll be back later.”

He plucks another crimson string from the fraying cloth, Emori blinking at the spidery movement of his fingers with a helpless, exasperated stare. Murphy glances up, looks somewhere past her, out into the hallway. “Is that safe?” (He trusts Raven. He does not trust space.)

The woman props an elbow against the doorway and gives him a wicked grin. “Have I ever done anything unsafe?” He can’t help but offer her a tight smile when she crosses the room to press a feather-light kiss to his cheek. It’s gentle, and it’s soft, and he’s forgotten it happened the moment her lips leave his skin. He won’t lose another family member to the stars.

“You tell Reyes if anything happens to you I’ll have to close the airlock on her,” he calls as she’s leaving, a flash of cargo pants and an army-green leather jacket swamping her little torso like a rain poncho, utterly sky person-esque. She casts a disapproving face over her shoulder before closing the door on his sentence, crushing his mostly-empty threat in her wake.

He wonders when he ended up with his very heart in the calloused hands of a mini-Raven.

Murphy’s hands work tirelessly at the blanket, and he pushes away the thought of Emori’s face of irritation and unconditional endearment when she comes back to a pile of strings for bedding. A sudden crack in the door and a hazel eye peering suspiciously through the slat. “Quit that. Go make yourself useful.” He shoos her away with a flick of his free hand and a theatrical eye-roll of grand proportions, though he wishes more than anything that she’d just come back to his arms, that she wouldn’t go play wrench-monkey in the unforgiving vastness of the cosmos just because Raven asked her to.

Little does she know- click- that he’s gone room to room, person to person, offering up his Jack-of-all-trades services free of charge and being turned away. Little does she know, because he’s sure she would stay up at night wondering if she could get away with dicing each of their space crew into tiny little pieces for rejecting Murphy’s help. Wondering, considering, plotting, doing?

Not worth the risk, though he might not miss Echo, necessarily. But he can quit pulling the blanket apart. That much he can do for her.

He folds it haphazardly and tosses it aside, and is met with the option to stare at the wall across from him, or leave the room.

Then he’s in the hallway, and he’s walking to nowhere, and a figure flits across one of the corridors right before he blinks. Murphy doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he knows more factory-station people that have died than lived and he wouldn’t put it past the likes of them to haunt the place.

Suddenly the cluttered, sharp echo of his boots against metal floors is chasing his heels, it’s after him, and he’s still going nowhere but faster now. “Make yourself useful,” she says. “Run from ghosts,” he hears.

A window in one of the non-haunted corridors is casting a tangerine glow over the hall, and Murphy feels the distinct nagging feeling of a memory trying to get in, _“If you love the earth so much, why don’t you kiss it?” They’re twelve years old and Mbege licks the glass of the port bay window and Murphy’s laughing so hard he doubles over, clutches his stomach. “Do you kiss girls like that?”_ He won’t grieve unprompted. He won’t smile in an empty hallway if he doesn’t have to.

He stops thinking about port bay windows and about ghosts and about thoughts and thinks the Earth must really be on fire when he sees it, and yeah, he’s right, it is.

The Earth’s really on fire and goddamn, what a beautiful sight to a bitter arsonist with a too-short list of names (ClarkeMillerAbbyDavid) in his back pocket that he won’t unfold, won’t spoil a sacrosanct moment like this for. The death wave has curled around the entirety of the planet and is alight and writhing with victory, with bloodlust. Murphy’s only concern is that perhaps he left Murphy down there, perhaps only John got into the rocket and accidentally left the rest of him behind, perhaps Murphy is burning to a dark little crisp in the melting snow.

Maybe that’s why he keeps thinking about ghosts and about loss and can’t seem to get angry up here, maybe that’s why he feels like a shell, who only knows to say ill-fitting words like “Okay,” and “Sorry.” John was only ever the match for Murphy’s flame.

The torched earth beams back at him and if Murphy could hear what he sees, he’d hear laughter so cruel and wicked from those radioactive flames that it might even scare him. He’s less pleased now than he was initially.

Fire is art.. Fire is powerful, vengeful, wrathful. Fire takes and, if your hands are out after the flame dies, fire gives. Fire is problem-solving. Fire is love, or at least he thinks so.

_Hazel eyes and a button nose painted with shadows and ink, a Cheshire-grin flashing at him like a crescent moon over a soft little cooking fire in a cave that smells of wet moss and rabbit’s meat. (He’s sure he loves her.)_

_Dark curls and sweat and split lips and a frightened squeak of leather as he grips Murphy’s jacket all of a sudden, he’s going to kiss him he’s going to kiss him he’s going to punch him? he’s going to kiss him he’s going to kiss him he’s- he’s handing him firewood. Bonfire, right. They’re just building a bonfire. (Does he love him?)_

_Fermented fruit and every vial of poison in the lair, trailed over the arresting officer’s belongings like rose petals, just a little bit fucked. His mother’s lying dead back at home and he can’t tell if he minds. A lit match falling at the foot of the trail and eating up the furniture and the rug and the sweet little drawings on the table and Murphy hopes the officer’s precious kid dies of the fucking flu. (This is love.)_

It sets in that he’d never really gotten to admire his work when they were dragging him away to the Skybox, kicking and screaming. Murphy’s walking too fast down the halls to really tell but he swears his footsteps aren’t even his anymore. Everywhere looks the same, cold metal cold metal cold metal, but he feels it in his joints and starts opening doors. The first one’s wrong but the second one is dotted with faint burn marks and the scent of smoke but only if Murphy imagines really, really hard.

He’d expected charred remains and an apology letter, and yeah, when he runs his fingertips against the burns scattered over the floor and smiles to himself, (he’s never left a mark on anything before, and God is he proud of his work here) his heart still feels too heavy, like maybe it’s going to drop out of his chest.

A sense of urgency is biting his heels like an angry dog and he can’t stop rushing from room to room now, it’s going to take him hours to find his way back to where he came from. Harsh blue fluorescent suns overhead that make his eyes feel like light flares flicker with each pounding beat of his shoes against the metal passageways like warnings, _turn back! Turn back! Turn back!_ But he’s after something, he’s a hunter, he’s-

Compartment #652 and a busted keypad from a guard’s baton and the doorway’s resting partially opened because it never quite closed without a chair propped up against it after that. A pale, hungry-looking hand that must belong to him but there’s no way to be perfectly sure flattens against the metal and eases into it. He’d know that horrendous creaking, screaming sound of protesting hinges anywhere, the echo-memory of his father’s booming laughter at the noise always following closely behind.

The place has been gutted for everything-

Missing:  
-That one ceramic plate, painted with fading lilies and curling stems.  
-The three coats, black, brown, bright red, one over the back of each chair.  
-Each chair.  
-Other traceable signs of life.

-but the bare boxspring mattress in the dead center. He takes a tentative step on trembling legs toward the lone artifact in a lost museum, runs his hands over the lumps and discolorations in the covering and the dust clings desperately to his fingers at the chance to vacate. Over, and over, and over, and over. He’s smoothing down the duvet one last time for when his mother comes home from a long day of trading his rations for booze and perhaps if the bed looks welcoming enough she’ll lie down in it instead of falling asleep on the couch again and she’ll be so happy she’ll put the bottle down on the bedside table and reach out to him and say thank you Johnny and she--she isn’t coming home this time.

His lip wobbles disobediently as he stares blankly into an empty doorway, cold and covered in cellophane to keep all the love in (or out) and they just aren’t coming home this time but maybe if he stares hard enough...

No. His head feels like it might topple off of his shoulders and he just wants to- he climbs onto the bed and spreads his arms out, flattens himself against it and presses his nose into the musty mattress. It doesn’t smell like green apple candies (mom) or old books (dad) anymore, just dust and a little bit of nothing (him).

He curls his fingers around the edges and this mattress used to seem longer and wider than all the oceans when he was nine years old. When he was nine years old and he knew he was too big now to be climbing over blanketed legs after a once-rare nightmare and sitting on his knees at the end of it, waiting for his parents to silently move apart and make a Johnny-shaped space between them with expertise. When he was nine years old and crawling into the little crevice between warm bodies and tired, exasperated grins shared over a sleepy tuft of brown hair. When he was nine years old and woke up to the three of them sinking into the overwhelmed dent in the middle of the bed, all smushed cheeks and tangled limbs and groans from Alex as he pushes the two of them away, laughing quietly into the sensitive ears of a still-dark morning. But nobody says a word.

“Murphy?” someone says.

He’s seventeen years old and the bed is full of ghosts or dust or just him and the earth is on fire and someone is saying a word.

“Mh?” he hums, muffled.

A weight settles tentatively and carefully at the foot of the mattress.

“Your home?”

“It was,” he answers. It’s a choked-off sound and his face is wet? but he isn’t sad. He isn’t. So what is this?

A broken sob falls from his lips as a counterpoint and he’s beginning to suspect the oxygen’s simply been turned off again because he isn’t sad. The mattress shudders, and, yeah. This doesn’t happen to him.

A fluttering touch at his ankle and what? What now? “Hey,” soft, low. Oh God, not him.

What? Murphy wants to bite, bares his teeth in the hot fabric and everything, but he’s afraid if he opens his mouth another one of those terrible sounds will claw its way out. He shakes his head microscopically, sorry, can’t talk right now, out of order.

“Murphy,” he says, and ‘Murphy’ wishes he would just go away already. There isn’t supposed to be a weight at that end anymore, nobody’s supposed to say a word. He curls in on himself, taking his mouth and nose from the mattress so he can breathe again, eyes clamped closed. None of any of this is even remotely right.

Suddenly the mattress is moving in waves, and the weight sinks somewhere, solid, the mattress dips behind Murphy. Murphy moves a cautious hand around blindly behind him, is that a person? His pinkie finger touches warm skin, warm like a furnace, and he reels his arm back into his chest and tucks it behind his rib cage before the ghost takes it and runs.

Murphy turns onto his back to further inspect this new development, cracks open one rainwater eye and feels like he’s doing something wrong. Bellamy’s laid out at his side, eyes closed and face draped in soothing peace and he shouldn’t be here but Murphy’s eyes run over his profile with mouthfuls of awe and bewilderment and gentle, flickering resentment. He’s close enough to touch, to breathe in.

“What-” Murphy croaks. Clears his throat. “What the hell are you doing?”

Bellamy opens a dark, amused eye of his own, and Murphy tracks its scattering movement as Bellamy maps the redness of his eyes and the lingering dewdrops on his cheeks. Murphy feels completely naked, wants to cover himself, wants to run and hide.

“Sleeping.” A sweep of a fingertip brushing a tear from the smooth bridge of his nose. Murphy blinks in quick succession, startled, and there’s a flicker of an apologetic smile on Bellamy’s chapped lips. “You mind?”

Murphy swallows hard. Looks to the ceiling for refuge. “Stay on your side,” Murphy says, and his mouth quirks up involuntarily at the corners when Bellamy obediently shifts a millisecond to the right.

And when they wake up in the dip in the middle, Bellamy’s arm trapped between them and Murphy’s forehead radiating warmly against the apple of Bellamy’s cheek at no fault of their own, Murphy huffs, Bellamy rolls his eyes.

Murphy sews his fingers around Bellamy’s wrist and they close their eyes again without making a lot of fuss about the irony of it all. (He’s seventeen years old and the bed smells like someone named Bellamy instead of green apple candies or old books and the earth is on fire and nobody says a word about any of it.)

 

 

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> ♫ just two dudes chillin in a bed 0 ft apart cause they're not gay ♫
> 
> hoo boy talk to me about murphy in the comments thanks im sad


End file.
